Alice Maher

Alice Maher (born 1956, Co.Tipperary) has produced some of the most iconic
images in Irish art: sculpture, photography, film-drawings, installation,
video and charcoal drawings. She is well known for her series of sculptures
using natural materials, her drawings and installations using human hair,
and photographic portraits of the artist using her own body and elements
taken from the wild. Her work is embedded in cultural history, mythology,
folklore, fairy tales and medieval history.

In Alice Maher's new watercolour series, The Glorious Maid of the Charnel
House, the internal and external worlds interface, co-exist and self
generate. Maher's reference points include art history, mythic narrative and
medical textbooks, as her shape shifting maids call down and mischievously
intervene with the often problematic history of visual representation of the
feminine throughout these fields. The inner and the outer body unfold and
enfold simultaneously and human, animal and vegetal intermingle and overlap
in intense hybrid form. The Glorious Maids of the Charnel House demonstrate
her continuing quest to allow her work to evolve into new languages and
material.

Becoming, a retrospective exhibition of Alice Maher's work, was held at the
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2012-13.